Introduction to Stylistics

Department of European,
American and Intercultural Studies
2016-2017

WEEK 1 - LECTURE 1
Dr. Margherita Dore
margherita.dore@uniroma1.it

Who is the Course for?

First Year Students (Channel P-Z)

Those students who enrolled n 2015-

2016 and still need to pass English 1
(Channel E-O), but please come to
see me.

Attendance is not compulsory but highly

recommended

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 Important Information
Calendar: 30 hrs (15 lectures, 7 weeks and a half)

Start date: Tuesday, 5-7 pm AULA 203

Timetable: Tuesday, 5-7 pm AULA 203

Thursday, 5-7 pm AULA 203

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Exam Information
The exam is in ENGLISH and normally WRITTEN, but it can
also be ORAL if students enrolled are less than 10.
WRITTEN EXAM:
It lasts no more than 2 hours, it is divided into 2 parts
Part 1: Task 1: Grammatical analysis; Task 2: Lexical
analysis; Task 3: Foregrounding Features; Task 4: Context
and Cohesion
Part 2: Question on theory

ORAL EXAM:
All the above discussed orally with your Lecturer.

Pagina 4
 Reference Books
Leech, G. N. and Short, M. H. (2007)
Style In Fiction, 2nd edition. London: Longman.

L. Wright, J. Hope, Stylistics, 1996.

C. Gregoriou, English Literary Stylistics, 2009.
Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics: A Resource Book
for Students. London: Routledge.
McIntyre, D. and Busse, B. (eds) (2010)
Language and Style. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan. (Selected chapters only).

Reference only (if you need to improve your background knowledge in

linguistics): Pinnavaia, L. (2009), Introduzione alla linguistica inglese, Roma:
Carocci.

All texts are avaialble at the Copy Centre in Villa Mirafiori.

Course Introduction
This Introduction to Stylistics Course focuses on the
linguistic analysis of texts, dealing particularly with the
relationship between linguistic choice and the readers
interpretation(s).
The analysis will concentrate primarily on literary texts but
other text types (e.g. newspaper articles, advertisements
and political speeches) will be also considered.
The course aims to provide Ss with a set of analytical
TOOLS that they can use to examine texts (for example,
their words, sounds, structures, or interactive aspects) and
reflect on them in relation to the context within which they
are created.
 Course Outline
Style and Stylistics. What is this all about?
Brief History of Stylistics and Literary Style
Mainly POETRY
Linguistic choice, style and meaning
Creativity: words and phrases
Foregrounding, patterns, deviations
Stylistics Devices: Rhetorical Devices, Figures of Speech
The grammar of simple sentences
Mainly PROSE
Style and style variation
Complex sentences and grammar
Discourse structure and point of view
Speech presentation
Mind Style and Prose analysis
Mainly DRAMA
Conversational structure and character(s)
Reading between the lines: meaning
Shared knowledge
Other Text Types
Advertisements, newspapers and political speeches

Style & Stylistics

Here we will be considering the STYLE OF TEXTS with a
systematic attention to what words or structures are chosen in
preference to others.
Style is here thought as the way in which language is used
in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose,
and so on (Leech & Short 2007: 9) and as the linguistic
characteristics of a particular text (Leech & Short 2007: 11)
Stylistics (or the study of style) investigates how readers
interact with the language of (mainly literary) texts in
order to explain how we understand and are affected
by texts when we read them.
 Brief History of stylistics
Stylistics explores how readers interact with the language of (mainly
literary) texts in order to explain how we understand and are affected by
texts when we read them.
Stylistics draws from Linguistics and Psychology and developed in the
second half of the twentieth century.
The following books represent its beginnings:
Fowler, Roger (ed.) (1966) Essays on Style in Language. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Freeman, Donald C. (ed.) (1971) Linguistics and Literary Style.New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Leech, Geoffrey N, (1969) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry.
London: Longman.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1960) Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Most importantly:
Roman Jakobson 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics' (in
Sebeok 1960: 350-77).

Brief History of Stylistics

Literary Criticism in Britain:
Practical Criticism: moving from studying authors (19th
Century) to studying texts (20th Century) and how readers
were effected by those texts; in the USA New Criticism.
They shared two important features:
(i) an emphasis on the language of the text rather than its
author;
(ii) Paying very close attention to the language of the texts
when reading them, describing how readers understood
them, were affected by them and then quoted them
(Claim and Quote)
 Brief History of stylistics
In the early years of the 20th century, the members of the Formalist
Linguistic Circle in Moscow (usually called the Russian
Formalists), like I. A. Richards, also favoured the analysis of the
language of the text in relation to psychological effects of that
linguistic structure.

Roman Jakobson left Moscow at the time of the Russian Revolution

and moved to Prague, where he became a member of the Prague
Structuralist circle.

Both circles contributed to develop the so called foregrounding

theory. This view suggested that some parts of texts had more
effect on readers than others in terms of interpretation, because the
textual parts were linguistically deviant or specially patterned in
some way, thus making them psychologically salient (or
'foregrounded') for readers.

Literary Style
(i) Style is a way in which language is used
(ii) Therefore style consists in choices made from the repertoire of the
language.
(iii) A style is defined in terms of a domain of language use (e.g., what
choices are made by a particular author, in a particular genre, or in a
particular text).
(iv) Style is relatively transparent or opaque: transparency implies
paraphrasability; opacity implies that a text cannot be adequately
paraphrased and that interpretation of the text depends greatly on the
creative imagination of the reader.
(v) Stylistic choice is limited to those aspects of linguistic choice
which concern alternative ways of rendering the same subject matter.
(vi) Stylistics (or the study of style) has typically been concerned with
literary language.
(vii) Literary stylistics is typically concerned with explaining the
relation between style and literary or aesthetic function
(Leech and Short 2007: 31)
 Linguistic choice, style and meaning
How great writing happens - Genius, or the careful
choice of language?

I wanderd lonely as a Cloud

That floats on high oer Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils . . .
(Wordsworth 1804)
I was strolling along
When all of a sudden
I saw a bunch of lovely Daffodils
(maybe you and I)

Linguistic choice, style and meaning

John Keats worked on various versions of this poem. One
word in particular changed in the first and the final version of
the poem. Which one do you think is Keats's final choice?

Try to work out why the choice you prefer is best:

close
As though a rose should and be a bud again
shut

(John Keats, 'The Eve of St Agnes, stanza 27, line 9)

 Linguistic choice, style and meaning
As though a rose should shut and be a bud again
So Keats rejects his first choice, close for its synonym, shut. A first
reaction might be that it doesnt really matter which word he chose. After
all, synonyms have the same meaning.

However, for most people the verb shut is a faster action than close
(quiet). Hence, poetry should better fit the calmness of close

Why, then, did Keats cross out close and write shut?

Close rhymes with rose; shut rhymes with bud

Levels of Language

Sounds/Writing i.e. Phonology (speech)

Shapes i.e. Graphology (writing)

Grammar i.e. Syntax and Morphology

Meaning e.g. Lexis ('word meaning')

e.g. Semantics ('sentence
meaning')
 The Sounds/Letters Level
Spoken language physically consists of distinctive speech
sounds (phonemes) which make up words

Phonemes are sounds which distinguish one word from

another (e.g. /bet/ vs. /pet/ or /bit/)

The written equivalent to the phonemic or phonological

level in speech is usually called graphology.

1. Girls like cats. (/kats/)

2. Girls like hats. (/hats/)

The Grammatical Level

Grammar is the form by which we position and group the elements
that go to make up sentences:

Syntax is the order in which words and phrases come in the

sentence. Sentence (1) below uses exactly the same words as
sentence (2) but the different syntax results in radically different
meanings:

1. Girls like cats.

S V O
1. Cats like girls.
S V O
Morphology accounts for the building blocks of
meaning inside words.
 The Meaning Level: Semantics
Different meaning
1. cats. (/kats/)
2. hats. (/hats/)

Different meaning (connotations and associations)

1. Girls like cats
2. Girls like feline quadrupeds

When we changed the syntax in sentence (1) to produce

sentence (2) we also changed the meaning of the
sentence in dramatic fashion. This sort of sentence
meaning is included in the aspect of meaning usually
called semantics

The Meaning Level: Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.

[Assume that the context is an article about the similarities and

differences between boys and girls.]
The favourite animal for boys is the dog. Girls like cats.
Here the meaning of the second sentence is the same as in (1), but
additionally it also has to be interpreted as an example of a
difference between boys and girls.

Now, imagine a conversation between two teenage boys:

A. Cats are stupid. What use is a cat?
B. Girls like cats.

Probable additional meaning: 'you could increase your chances

of getting a girl to like you by saying that you like cats'.
 Textual analysis 1 - Instructions
In the next slide, I report a poem by Stephen Crane, but with
a choice of three possible alternatives in four places in the
poem. Preferably working with some other students, your
task is:

to work out, in each of the four places, which choice that

you think Crane actually made, and
to work out why you think your choice is preferable, taking
into account the effects at different linguistic levels that one
choice or another has in relation to the rest of the poem.

It is important that you work carefully at what you think the

best choices are, and why, as you will then get more out of
comparing your views, and so learn more.

Textual analysis 1
on place
I stood upon a high mountain
in hill

And saw, below, many devils

Running, leaping

living
And indulging in sin.
carousing

One looked up, grinning,

"Comrade! Brother!"
And said "Join us!"
"Help me!"
Stephen Crane
Peer, W (1988) 'How to do things with texts: Towards a pragmatic foundation for the teaching of
texts', in Short, M (ed) Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature, 267-297.
 Textual analysis 2 -KEY

I stood upon a high place,

And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping
And carousing in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said 'Comrade! Brother!'

Textual analysis 3 - DISCUSSION

We can see from this exercise that style and meaning come
about in large part because of the linguistic choices that writers
(and speakers) make. By paying close attention to what words,
grammatical constructions, phonetic patterns and so on that a
writer makes in a text, and comparing those choices with other
choices which could have been made in the same context, we
are able to detect important aspects of meaning and effect that
particular texts have. The clearest example in this poem are
those where Crane chose an alternative which most people
would not choose. Choosing the unusual in a way which
coheres with the rest of the text is a large part of what makes
effective writing effective (and separates the truly creative
writers from the rest of us). Being able to chart choices and
compare them in detail with other conceivable choices helps us
to unlock meanings embedded in texts which we may
otherwise be able to feel in a rather vague way but not be able
to articulate clearly.
 Introduction to Stylistics
Department of European,
American and Intercultural Studies
2016-2017

WEEK 1 - LECTURE 2
Dr. Margherita Dore
margherita.dore@uniroma1.it

Overview
Creativity: Word classes
Open Class Words
Defining Open Class Words
Closed Class Words
Manipulating nouns
Manipulating verbs
Manipulating adverbs

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 Creativity: Word classes

Words and phrases in English are

the basic building blocks of
English grammar.

We will see how writers can

manipulate these language levels
in order to create special meanings
and effects.

Word Classes
Test your intuitions on the following words. What is the most
basic word class for each of the following words?

Noun Verb Adjective Adverb

Run

chair

yellow

near
 Word Classes

Noun Verb Adjective Adverb

Run
X

chair
X

yellow
X

near
X

Word Classes
We can make a basic distinction between open class (lexical) and
closed class words:
 Open Class Words
Open class words are extremely large in number and about
90% of the words in our personal vocabularies belong to this
class. It is possible to coin new words in this Class:

black + box - blackbox (N/V) blackboxed (V)

And we can combine meaningful parts of words

(morphemes) to generate new words:

micro microscope - microchip

Defining Open Class Words

 Closed Class Words
Closed class words are referred to as grammatical or function words, and
they serve to link up open class words in longer meaningful structures:
Types of Closed
Symbol Examples
Class Words
Determiner/ article (d) the, a, this, that, some, any, all
Pronoun (pn) you, me, she, them, some, it, us
Preposition (p) in, of, on, at, to, under, from
Conjunction (cj) and, but, or, if...then, although
Auxiliary Verb (aux) can, will, may, is, has, does, shall
Enumerator (e) one, three, first, second, eighteenth
Interjection (ij) oh, ah, ugh, hey, oops, gadzooks,
****!

Example
Now look at this sentence. Try and classify its
composing elements:

The horses ran near their stable.

Three questions to help identify what class a word
belongs to:
What kind of MEANING does it have? - what does it refer
to or express?
What is its FUNCTION? - its purpose or role relative to
other words within a phrase, clause or sentence?
What is its FORM? - its morphological structure (root
and suffix, inflections etc.)
 Exercise 1- KEY

The horses ran near their stable.

Art N V ADV Pos.ADJ N

Horses, ran, near and stable are open-class

words.

The and their are closed-class words.

Inflectional vs Derivational Morphemes

Derivational Morphemes are used to create
new words from old ones (they change the
meaning or part of speech)
e.g. to buy -> buyer; to sell -> seller;
quick -> quickly

Inflectional Morphemes mark grammatical

categories (do not change the meaning or part of
speech)
e.g. tall -> taller; work -> worked

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 Derivation

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Compounding
Avocado Pig

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 Clipping
Can you reconstruct the longer word?

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Acronyms

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 Blends

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Backformation

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 Invention

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Borrowing and calque

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 Manipulating Nouns
. . . and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons
unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of
sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying
floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all
kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter
winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and
succedanea in a word I resume and concurrently simultaneously
for reasons unknown to shrink and dwindle in spite of the tennis I
resume flying gliding golf over nine and eighteen holes tennis of
all sorts in a word for reasons unknown in Feckham Peckham
Fulham Clapham . . .

(Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, pp. 43-4)

Manipulating Verbs
[Context: The extract below is from near the beginning of a novel about a
man who is drowning. He has apparently managed to cling to a piece of
rock and is struggling not to be swept off it by the sea.]

His legs kicked and swung sideways. His head ground against
rock and turned. He scrabbled in the white water with both hands
and heaved himself up. He spat and snarled. He glimpsed the
trenches with their thick layers of dirty white, a gull slipping away
over a green sea. Then he was forcing himself forward. He fell into
the next trench, saw a jumble of broken rock, slid and stumbled.
He was going down hill and he fell part of the way.

(William Golding , Pincher Martin, p. 42)

 Manipulating Adjectives
[Below is a passage from Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner .
Consider the effects of the adjectives in the extract , which I have
highlighted for you]

The Hotel du Lac (Famille Huber) was a stolid and

dignified building, a house of repute, a traditional
establishment, used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-
do, the retired, the self-effacing, the respected patrons of
an earlier era of tourism. It had made little effort to smarten
itself up for the passing trade which it had always despised.
Its furnishings, although austere, were of excellent quality,
its linen spotless, its service impeccable.

(Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac, p 13)

Manipulating Adverbs

Now the party was noisily in full swing. Many

students were singing raucously. Others lurched
drunkenly here and there. Then, suddenly, there
was a horrifyingly loud noise outside.

It is quite difficult to find a text with a large amount of

adverbs in it. The adverb is the least frequent and most
optional, grammatically, of the four major word classes.
 What we covered so far
Leech, G. N. and Short, M. H. (2007) Style In Fiction, 2nd
edition. London: Longman (Study Ch. 1)
L. Wright, J. Hope, Stylistics, 1996 (Study Ch. 1)
C. Gregoriou, English Literary Stylistics, 2009 (Study Ch.
1)
Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics: A Resource Book for
Students. London: Routledge. (Study Sections A1-A2)

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